BBC does it again ...

Once again I find myself untrusting of the BBCs reporting of technology and science related stories. Here's a nice example:

BBC News: Changing the Face of Wireless

This is a straight forward piece about the future of wireless networking, and how it should help ease the confusion over existing systems.

First of all there's this quote:

"That wi-fi world is full of letters and numbers, a bit like the real world but a lot more complicated."

What the heck does that mean? That has to be the most random thing I've heard all weekend. And whilst that had me stumpted, I continued reading:

"What's happened is the digital world had caught up and demands 10, 11, 12 megabits per second throughput, and 'b' and 'g' and all its variants can't deliver that."

10 megabits? 'b' and 'g' can't deliver 10 megabits/second? Last time I checked 802.11b topped out at 12Mbps, and .11g at 54Mbps ... with Netgear and Linksys offering 108Mbps options. I can see where this quote might have originated: from a discussion about digital media and sustained data rates over wireless ... but existing WiFi systems can easily handle a 10Mbps stream of data. And speaking of data, how many people have the regular urge to pump over 10Mbps of 'digital media' for a sustained period over their network? The average DVD would only need about half that bandwidth to play; digital TV requires even less. This demand from the 'digital world' must be coming from something else, but - of course - they don't state what.

And finally:

"In June 2004, the IEEE started working on the [802.11]N standard and two years on they still have not agreed anything."

They report that fact like it's a bad thing. We've got a perfectly decent - and (if you ignore the 108Mbps offerings) a standardised, compatible wireless system. The brains behind the first two standards are now working on a third (802.11n). They're not going to throw the whitepaper together over beers at the pub ... creating an internationally standardised wireless protocol takes time, I imagine.

I don't know how they do it, but the BBC had once again taken random pieces of information about some current and future technology (seemingly gathered in one phone call, and an afternoon spent on Google), and merged it all together to produce a 'story'. I don't mind the odd bit of 'dumbing down'. After all, not everyone knows the details about wireless networks, and these stories are supposed to inform a wide audience. But it infuriates me when they dumb-down a story to the point where it doesn't make any sense. That doesn't help anyone - it just serves to confuse people, or make them believe something is just so, when the opposite is true.

For a story that set out by saying that the world of WiFi is confusing for consumers, it's done a remarkable job in generating yet more confusion.

To sum everything up using a common expression of mine: "Nghhhh!".

(Have you ever had one of those days where all these little things get to you? :o)